


when the sea sings (it cries)

by billspilledquill



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Multi, Selkies, everyone is stupid and have background stories
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-19 08:02:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13700301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/billspilledquill/pseuds/billspilledquill
Summary: Jefferson had always believed in science.Not the typical sense, at least; he believed in unalienable rights of men as a principle of matter, not of custom, that everything that came before him and after him had a righteous sense of justice that humanity that been seized into since the beginning of time.The science of faith, outside of religion, was optimism.Love triangles and selkies and confessions, and until someone dies, everything is all fun and games.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i really wanted to write about selkies, so voilaaa
> 
> sorry for all the icelanders, i love your country but jefferson sucks

 

_"Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?"_

_"Alas!", replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining_

_that everything is best when it is worst."_

 

* * *

 

Jefferson had always believed in science.

Not the typical sense, at least; he believed in unalienable rights of men as a principle of matter, not of custom, that everything that came before him and after him had a righteous sense of justice that humanity that been seized into since the beginning of time.

The science of faith, outside of religion, was optimism. 

He was a journalist, the one where his friends would refer him as the founding father of breaking news, since he liked being buried in his works until dawn breaks with drafts of news flowing and mounted into stacks of papers in his office.

So when he was busy reading Voltaire in his office - a small worn thing - busy annotating the important part (every part was an important part, trust him), his boss showed up. 

He startled, dropping the book face plat on the floor.

“Angelica,” he said, looking at her usual stoic face, “what did I do wrong this time?”

She was the chef executive of their small office, not that she wasn’t fierce and worthy enough to operate in a big cooperation, but she supported the local business and somehow liked them enough during her stage so she decided to stay. Like what an Angelica would do.

She put a finger on his messy table, eyes fixing his with some kind of sick excitement, “I need you and John to fly to Iceland.”

“What?” he said, “ That dark and icy place?” He frowned, it’s not like John and him were exceptionally good friends. “There better be a boom shell, or you can’t move me, or John, for that matter.”

“John already agreed,” she said, smiling. Oh god she was scary when she smiled. “Don’t you worry, Mr. my-family-is-rich-as-fuck, your family can put me in jail and mine can bail me out and kill you simultaneously .”

“I know,” he said, “is this something involving turtles or sea-creatures?”

“Better,” she grinned this time, and it was terrifying, “a selkie.”

 

* * *

 

 

Jefferson had always been a believer of science. 

When he was little, he believed that his fear for public speaking was due to science - how 90% of population was afraid of it, how his interest for girls was explained by x and of boys by y, while all of this combined created a person that can be listed as x and y and a statistic.

Loved science and math, read _Fault In Our The Stars_ and all - because if somehow doing all these things prevent him from meeting an actual fucking selkie in twenty-seven years of his life, he was willing to do these things all over again.

“John,” he asked in the plane, a seat between them empty, “what the fuck?”

Laurens gave him a glance, then discovered that the outside of the plane window was much more interesting, “Yeah.’

Jefferson huffed, “Do you think Angelica was just fucking with us?”

“She doesn’t fuck around, you know that.”

“Yeah, but I find it hard to believe that --” 

“Relax, Jefferson,” he said, eyes still out of the window, “it won’t kill you, so don’t be such a climate-change skeptic about it.”

“Excuse me?” he retorted, voice biting, “I just find the existence of such a - a fantastic creature to be real, we are not fucking ten graders anymore.”

Laurens shrugged, “Science is not knowledge, Jefferson.”

“What?”

“Things don’t get explained by science, not really. Science gets explained by the stories of pretend science,” he said, “so immaturity gets explained by ten graders, by intelligence, and our de-facto IQ, but it mostly gets explained by the stories. The theories. The objective truth.”

“So when a selkie looks at you in the eye,” he said, “believe the stories. There’s no other truth than the stories.”

 

* * *

 

 

When they arrived on the place, though, there was already a mass of people around the beach, people with children, people with cameras, people with pen and paper and inappropriate outfits for beaches like lab glasses and coats.

“Are we missing something?” asked Laurens, his features bright under the dawn and the slowly seeping moonlight. Something about this made Jefferson feel cold to the bones.

Through the mumbling of the audience, he could hear soft whimpers that weren’t human enough to be ugly, then whimpers slowly became shrieks. It sounded like a melody.

“No, no,” said someone, Jefferson couldn’t leave his eyes from a small part of skin shown through layers of people, it was gray and disgusting, “we are trying to make it talk, or at least make it move.”

“It can’t move?” Laurens said, with too much concern, “can I see it? Maybe it’s wounded.”

The person went into the crowd to speak to another person, as if they reserved their right over it, and when he emerged, a small nod made Laurens right into action.

“Laurens!” he cried, trying to catch up, “I believe that you are way too enthusiast to this--”

He stopped short, because the moon was bright as the sun and Laurens was rushing to the creature like a long lost lover, and the creature itself was staring right back at him. The gray skin was almost peeled off, revealing smooth skin instead. A stomach wound was visible, red and in a most morbid way, beautiful. Someone shoot him in the ribs. Everything about it was beautiful. 

They hold eyes for two minutes, it didn’t even blink once. 

 _Violet_ , he thought, before the selkie closed its eyes and fainted under the weight of the red and the moon.  

“Oh god,’ he said, science snickering at him through the selkie’s dead gray skin, _told you_ , “what the fuck?”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> probably will continue this??? maybe


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jefferson still sucks and 1% of background story gets revealed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all that had commented! It keeps me going :DD

 

 

Every action has its equal opposite reaction, he concluded internally, when he first saw John’s boyfriend.

Even Newton would be surprised, Jefferson mused, quite pettily. He had never seen someone who talk _this_ much.

“-- and I swear Jack,” the guy said bashfully, loud enough for the whole coffee shop to hear, “don’t get me started on Poe, dude. He married his first cousin who was thirteen at the time. She died a widow when the guy was busy writing poems about marriage.”

“So was Einstein, sweetheart,” John was honest to god __amused__. How did he even deal with this guy? “I don’t understand how you can examine a poet’s literary work by their personal contribution like engaging in marital ceremonials with you first cousin,” he said, “by that standard, your Lord Byron obsession is illogical. We all know that he’s a bag of farts.”

“Oh no,” he said,” don’t you __dare.__ ”

And so on.

“Do you think they will ever stop?” His then girlfriend asked -- her name was Emily? Julie? Something that ended with an y sound. He can’t even begin to remember anything about her. They were together for two months.

He looked at John, still talking. His smile never faded from his boyfriend’s face, a distinct pleasure on the tilt of his mouth, a fond and proud smile. Like he was in love.

Laurens’ boyfriend, though, looked really and genuinely frustrated, but the same way Jefferson would be frustrated at the wind, at the blue and clear sky, at a chill afternoon in June. Frustrated because it will end, angry because it will change, saddened because nothing lasts.

The guy somehow sensed Jefferson’s glance -- his gloved hand took a thread of his hair behind his ear --and they locked eyes. Pits of black, endless rims of coal rings. He had always liked the color of it, liked how it shone under the sunlight, how it would be opaque or transparent or both, how black didn’t fit in the spectrum of colors, pads of blue and red and yellow would lead to darkness. That’s how black holes got done.

 _ _Tell the truth but tell it slant.__ He had never been good in both.  

“I hope not,” he said, “let them auto-destruct, we can go home.”

He never been in a double date with Laurens again. Never saw his boyfriend again, neither.

The next he will insult Laurens for whatever he was saying, he would mention his (ex, probably) boyfriend was a gloved monster who liked Byron without any irony. Which was, to his knowledge, the most damning insult of all time.

 

* * *

 

“Do you remember your Byron-loving boyfriend, Laurens?”

“Fuck off, Jefferson,” Laurens barked, “now’s not the time.”

They were in the waiting room of a hospital. As if a selkie needed hospitals. The clock struck five. The crowd had already dispersed, they can see these things via news. That was why they were here anyway.

“Why his hands were gloved that day?” he asked, because somehow a double-date was the only memory they shared together that was memorable enough to make him ask about it in five in the morning. “I can’t recall that day being particular cold. Beside how wears them in a coffee shop?”

He didn’t tell that the guy looked like an actual fire that he couldn’t even think for a moment that he would ever be cold. It would sound odd.

“Shut the fuck up, Jefferson,” Laurens buried his head in his hands, sighed, “you can go back to the hotel, you know.”

The hospital felt silent, it was silent for a long time, “I don’t want to.”

“Don’t be a child,” he said in a whisper, “there’s nothing interesting here.”

“I don’t know,” he looked into the white rigid door, trying to discern something alive in it, “maybe there’s a fucking selkie in the other side of this room.”

“You said you don’t believe in those ‘ _ _creatures’, if I may use your quotations,__ ” he said, “don’t expect that you can get away from throwing words like that in the air and unless you want to get punched, go the fuck to sleep.”

“Why are you so protective of it?” he frowned, irritated, “We are going to picture the - the __thing__ and make some remarks about it, maybe try to be professional and observe it for some weeks, but that’s it. That’s it, John. So if I’m going to sleep, you are going with me.”

Laurens balled his fists, shaking with anger. He seemed ready to land that fist on his face, “How --”

A scoff. They turned, “Sirs? Are you the journalists of The Liberty?”

It was a young doctor, or possibly scientist, this hospital was strange and it was late enough for Jefferson to not care. They nodded in unison.

“We have some information to share if you wish,” he said, a placid smile on his face, “you were one of the first to receive this exclusive news. I’m Aaron Burr, nice to meet you.”

Maybe because it was horribly late, or that the doctor’s smile was too blindingly sweet, Jefferson laughed under the artificial light. Until then, it was silent.

 

* * *

 

It went better than he thought, at least. In his worst scenario, the selkie starts an apocalypse with human technology and killed all of humanity in the process, so yeah, it went better than expected.

“It’s a curious specimen,” Burr said, while the two of them were scribbling ineligible things on their notebook, “its bones are contorted in a particular way that would probably make the scientists go crazy worldwide.”

“Why there aren’t more people in this room? I suspect this may be international - or at least national news, since folklore is better known here, I guess.”

“We are in a semi disclosure for now,” he said, pacing around the bed where the muscles of the selkie twitched every seconds, “I am… acquainted with Angelica, and she absolutely wanted to send people down here. We also want a small number of media, so we eventually agreed upon consideration.”

“And what are you? A diplomat?”

“My profession now is not the elephant in the room,” he smiled again, gesturing the sleeping selkie, arm still twitching in a horrible way, “I would have to request a number of things in order to let you be the sole publisher of this news.”

Laurens crossed his arms, arched a eyebrow, “Oh?”

“You see,” he said, touching the creature’s damp forehead, red hairs intertwined between slender fingers, “selkies weren’t supposed to be selkies once on earth. Well, at least, that’s what the story says anyway.”

“They became human,” Laurens whispered, lips trembling, “they get rid of their coat and have legs.”

“Yes,” Burr answered, pleased, “but it--” they looked at the gray dried skin on the lower body, like a caterpillar in midway of her transformation -- “well, you see, it is not… developed.”

“So?” Jefferson said, “what can we do about this?”

He shrugged, “Look, if there’s no way I can press you into it, the door is right here --”

Laurens stepped between them, “We’ll do it.”

“Wait, who said --” he stopped as soon as he saw Laurens’ eyes. The pleading in them. Laurens never begged him. “Ugh, how many days?”

“Two months for observation, then you can write a little paper and go home.”

Jefferson didn’t have time to complain-- _you got to be fucking kidding me_ _\--_ because a whimper was heard and everyone stopped moving and he can only see violet and red and skin because the creature was looking at him and _holy shit who in the name of god has violet eyes ---_

“John,’ it suddenly said, weak but clear, eyes still on Jefferson as though he couldn’t distinguish between the two, “you would have to give my coat back, John.”

Beside Jefferson, a scream ensued.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what do you mean that ham wouldn't like a shitty aristocrat poet and the epitome of human disaster known as lord byron

**Author's Note:**

> probably won't continue this??? maybe


End file.
